A dermatological treatment laser incorporating a laser resonator into a handpiece is disclosed in U.S. Publication No. US 2007/0265604, which is commonly owned with the present application and is incorporated herein by reference. The resonator includes an Er:YSGG or Cr,Er:YSGG gain medium, which has a primary output at 2.79 μm. The handpiece includes two stepper motors that scan the laser output in two axes. In one exemplary method, the handpiece is held in a fixed position while a pattern of 5 mm treatment spots is formed on the skin by stepping the treatment beam in X and Y directions.
For certain applications such as treatment of deep wrinkles, it may be beneficial to treat the skin using a matrix of much smaller diameter (e.g. approximately 200-400μ) non-overlapping spots. With the reduced spot size, a much larger number of spots is needed for a given treatment area. The present application discloses a laser handpiece suitable for generating the large number of spots more quickly than if each spot was generated individually.